The Collaborative Book

The effect of realtime and time on the writing process

Originally published by: New Scientist

The image of a book is a physical one: the thick cover, the heft of the interior block, the feel of a page’s edge. A permanent thing, immutable.

Publishers, writers, readers and software makers are busy trying to shoehorn this old idea of the book into new media. They ask, “How do we change books to read them digitally?” But the more interesting question is, “How does digital media change books?”

With digital media, that immutibility is subverted. Text can change it continuously and in real time. As a result, time itself becomes an active element in the crafting of stories.

Wikipedia is a fully realised example of this. The core editorial ethos of the physical encyclopedia still informs Wikipedia, but the ways in which content is created, shared and expanded on are entirely digital constructs. When you take a set of encyclopedias and ask, “How do I make this digital?” you get a Microsoft Encarta CD. When you take the philosophy of an encyclopedia and ask, “How does digital change our engagement with this?” you get Wikipedia.

When we think about digital’s effect on storytelling, we tend to grasp for the lowest hanging fruits: words will move, pictures become movies, every story will be a choose-your-own-adventure. While digital does make all of this possible, these are the changes of least radical importance.



The core ethos of why someone writes does not necessarily change. And the final form of the output (paragraphs, chapters, etc) may not feel so different from digitized editions of printed books. But what does change is the very process of creation: the movement from idea to text to reader. It may not be as flashy as flying text, embedded movies and interactive chapters, but it is having a far more profound impact on the words we read.


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